~ephes

Django Cast has powered python-podcast.de since 2018, but I have barely explained it in public. That is a slightly odd state for an open source Django and Wagtail package with podcast feeds, comments, media handling, themes, and enough production use to have opinions.

I started building it in September 2017. Nearly nine years later, it has slowly turned from a personal publishing tool into something other people could plausibly use.

The short version: Django Cast is for people who want to build a blogging or podcasting site, and who are fine with Wagtail as the CMS, Django as the application foundation, and podcasting as part of the content model rather than a bolt-on. Blog-only is also fine — several Django Cast sites have no podcast at all.

We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it. —Jean-Claude Juncker

Bit of a travel-heavy week. I flew back from Athens on Monday after DjangoCon Europe, then was off again on Tuesday morning—this time on the train to Brussels for a few days on-site. Spent the rest of the working week there, which was no hardship: the food was excellent, the beer was better, and the weather actually cooperated for once.

Got home Friday evening, and the weekend wasn't exactly quiet either: Saturday and Sunday I was at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, which traditionally piggybacks on beyond tellerrand—usually the weekend right before or right after. This year it was right before. Really nice to see that crowd again.

Open Source

Despite all the travel, I managed to ship a few small things:

• Brought my django-indieweb package back into shape. It was overdue for some attention and IndieWebCamp was the perfect excuse.
• Cut a new release of django-cast.
• Fixed an issue in kptncook and pushed a new release while I was at it.

And because I clearly don't have enough side projects, I also started a small benchmark repo for local LLMs. The main question I'm after: which backend is actually faster (or slower) on which hardware? Primary focus is Apple Silicon, but I'm also curious about smaller GPUs you can pick up cheaply. Very early days—but local models are getting noticeably better and more interesting at the moment, and it feels worth tracking properly.

Articles

• Grid Security at Scale: How TenneT Built a 10× Faster Analysis Platform on PowSyBl (LF Energy) | TenneT got a 10× speedup on grid security analysis by building ReFlow on top of the open-source PowSyBl framework. Always nice to see a big TSO lean into open source for the load-bearing stuff.

Software

• p5.js | Friendly JavaScript library for creative coding—low barrier to entry, surprisingly capable. Tempted to use it for some weekend hacking.

Sorry I’ve been weird lately, but I was also weird before —Donnie Saphire

I'm slowly catching up on everything that piled up over the past few weeks. My poor impulse control has me daydreaming about home office renovations and improvements. I've also been tinkering with my Home Lab setup (Home Assistant, Paperless, etc.), which mostly runs on an old Mac mini running Linux. Since I occasionally need to reboot the machine and Linux still can't accept LUKS passphrases remotely (unlike macOS), I picked up a JetKVM switch to handle that. The JetKVM uses HTTP by default, which isn't ideal when entering sensitive data like passphrases, though there's experimental HTTPS support and a "secure cloud-native" connection method (which I'm somewhat skeptical about).

I finally took the plunge and upgraded to macOS/iOS 26.1. It's still got some rough edges but no longer has any dealbreakers for me. Also went to a sauna for the first time in years and am thinking about making it a regular thing. Not bad at all!

Articles

• Frontend
  • The fetch()ening | htmx 4.0?
  • Built the Same App 10 Times: Evaluating Frameworks for Mobile Performance | I still like htmx the most, but interesting analysis!
  • Custom Asidenotes
  • marko - A declarative, HTML-based language that makes building web apps fun
• Agentic Coding
  • Absurd Workflows: Durable Execution With Just Postgres | Good idea!
  • What if you don't need MCP at all? | Skills without skills - nice 😊
  • Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex
• Python
  • PEP 810: Explicit lazy imports | Cool 🎉
  • Announcing DjangoCon Europe 2026 in Athens, Greece! ☀️🏖️🏛️🇬🇷 | Thinking hard about going there..
• Misc
  • Running 1:1s for Engineers

Videos

• Talking Agentic Engineering with Giovanni Barillari

OH: Dance like no one is watching, love like you’ve never been hurt—but code like all your repos are public. —li5a

I haven't published Weeknotes in a few months—been heads down on Steel-IQ, easily one of the most complex projects I've worked on in recent years. Last week we finally shipped it: an open-source modelling platform for steel decarbonisation, now out in the world for anyone to explore. I was genuinely impressed by how deep you can go into the details of industrial decarbonisation.

Beyond the source code, we packaged a standalone build so you can install it locally, feed in your own data, and run scenarios that stretch the steel system out to 2050 (no Python setup required). It's a standalone Django/Electron app with a graphical interface for configuring runs, so definitely run some simulations before installing that blast furnace in your backyard. 😉

Last week we had another Homebrew Website Club Düsseldorf meetup. Big thanks to Daniel for spotting a bug in my django-indieweb package—we actually managed to fix it right there during the session. I also spent some time last week installing Arch Linux on an old 2019 Intel MacBook Pro. It went pretty smoothly, though I'm still having issues with sleep/suspend and the touchbar isn't working.

Articles

• While we're talking about weird Python edge cases, what do you think this does? | cool thread 🧵
• The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program | right decision, I set up a monthly donation—you should do the same.
• Async Django: a solution in search of a problem | Interesting take, though I think there's some confusion here. Mixing async as an I/O multiplexing concept with background tasks like Celery (which is completely different) doesn't really help the argument. And useful benchmarks are genuinely hard—not difficult to get this wrong! 😊 Ironically, I actually agree with the conclusion that most Django developers won't need async views. Most websites simply don't need to have lots of long-lived open connections. But when you DO need that—whether for WebSockets, SSE, serving large files, or minimizing latency with multiple backend service calls—async support is probably the most elegant solution we have right now. Maybe threads will be a viable alternative once Python's threading story improves (especially with the recent free-threading work), but that's also complex and will take years. The async effort definitely wasn't wasted—it's what makes Django viable for all use cases without having to switch frameworks.
• Scripts I wrote that I use all the time | Some nice ideas in there..
• Building a typical section design with modern CSS | CSS can be really nice if you know what you are doing..
• Same-document view transitions have become Baseline Newly available | go firefox 😁
• moneyflow - Terminal UI for personal finance power users | This is interesting. I use a combination of moneymoney and YNAB but am looking for a self hosted replacement for YNAB.
• Default Apps 2025 | Nice overview.
• The State of Django 2025 | It's fascinating how quickly things are evolving. Just this February, I was giving a talk advocating for Django with htmx over the complexity of SPAs. Now, when I run into a broken SPA project—whether it won't build or the tests are failing after updates—I can just point Claude Code or codex at it, say "please fix," and it actually works most of the time. Makes you wonder if all these architectural debates even matter anymore.

Videos

• Talking AI and Agentic Coding with Yury Selivanov | Great discussion, really insightful! And yes, these tools are hard to use. Yes, they're dangerous. Yes, they make it incredibly easy to fool yourself. But are they actually useful? Absolutely.
• Build to Last Chris Lattner on software craftsmanship and AI

Out of Context Images

Your call is important to us. Please enjoy this 40 minute flute solo. —Col

Back to work this week. I made it to a Homebrew Website Club meeting, which was really nice. On the homelab front, I added a Paperless-ngx instance and made some solid improvements to my DNS setup.

The big win was getting my own nameserver working properly – it's now smart enough to return local IPs when I'm on my home network, Tailscale IPs when I'm remote with Tailscale running, and external IPs when I'm out and about without Tailscale. Everything plays nicely together since Traefik handles TLS termination for all scenarios, so I get valid HTTPS whether I'm hitting RFC 1918 addresses, Tailscale IPs, or coming in from outside. For external connections, I've added some extra security layers for peace of mind.

Articles

• The State of Python 2025: Trends and Survey Insights | I'm always shocked seeing so many people being new to Python. Where are they?
• Better CSS layouts: Time.com Hero Section
• My Current AI Dev Workflow

Software

• Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting
• 🌟 Awesome LLM Apps

Videos

• The history of Python and how it took over the world | Python: The Documentary | Just for reference, didn't like the video much..